Trump

There is a huge discrepancy in the way that USA President Trump is regarded in his own country and how he is regarded in Israel.

For many Israelis, he is extremely popular¹, albeit unpredictable, although that unpredictability may help his popularity. He is the man who managed to return the last of the Israeli hostages after the 7 October massacre; he also put an end to that war. He is the man who many Israelis believe is about to start another war with Iran and possibly even bring an end to the reign of the Ayatollas. That Iran will attack Israel should USA (and possibly Israel) attack Iran is seen as collateral damage.

Every time I see Trump on Israeli news, I ask my wife whether the average American in the street is even slightly interested in what Trump is doing in foreign lands. The partial answer was shown on tv the other night: his US popularity has declined to about 40% (may be lower) which is very low for an incumbent president.

As Professor Michael Covington (who I follow for computing reasons) writes, I think February 20, 2026, may be remembered as the end of the Trump era in American politics — it may have broken Trump's spell in a way that the election of Biden did not. That is the day the Supreme Court overturned Trump's capriciously imposed tariffs. He is trying to reinstate the tariffs by other legal mechanisms, but that's not the important part.

Trump single handedly cost many Israelis a great deal of money when he began a trade war last year: the S&P 500 share benchmark funds dropped in value overnight and have not regained the momentum that they had before. I had no small amount of money linked to the S&P 500 (retirement funds) and although I switched them to Israeli share funds (that had a phenomenal yield last year), there was some loss. Not everyone was adept as I (and there are probably more people adept than me in this field) and so some probably suffered.

Internal links
[1] 2018

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This day in blog history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
159	23/02/2009	Diet	Cooking, Food science, Diet, Jeff Duntemann
678	23/02/2014	Carole Bayer Sager - too	Carole Bayer Sager
679	23/02/2014	DCI Banks on television	TV series, DCI Banks, Police procedurals
1378	23/02/2021	My room (waiting for wonderland) - a little musical analysis	Van der Graaf Generator, Music theory

Migrating a query form to D12CE

I reckon that yesterday¹'s serendipitous discovery about the data controls saved about ten hours' work and who knows how much frustration. With not having to worry about data controls, I was able to dive straight in to the migration process. To use a metaphor, migrating an application is like hill climbing; one has to put in a great deal of work to cover maybe 80% of what needs to be done, but once that 80% is done, the rest is relatively easy.

After having obtained what I thought was a stable framework with nothing extra defined, I wanted to migrate a simple query form first: this form displays the number of times each unit has been accessed by which user during a given time period. This form uses the regular (for me) paradigm² of a page control with two tabs, one in which the user chooses values for parameters and one in which the relevant data is displayed. This form also allows the query parameters to be saved for recall at a later date.

As such, even though I'm theoretically migrating one unit (Manage38, to be precise), I also have to migrate a unit that handles the saved parameters (Manage137) and add the various necessary queries to the data module. Adding the necessary queries is mechanical work, copying the name, sql statement and parameters from the old dbExpress based queries to the new FireDAC queries. There is one very important caveat with this: if the query is saving a Hebrew string (like the name of a person or an activity or whatever), the parameter datatype must be defined as ftWideString; this ensures that the string will be saved in Unicode Hebrew.

I don't think that Manage137 presented any challenges, but Manage38 certainly did. Apart from replacing queries, I also had to reconnect an OnCalcFields handler to one of the queries. The major problem with this unit was the handling of indexes for displaying the data, should the user wish to change by which field the data is sorted, and whether it is sorted in reverse. I had devoted some time to this issue previously³, but there the solution was very specific, using real field names, whereas I wanted something much more generic - the index handling routine will probably be used by 50-100 units! 

As I wrote then,[w]ith a ClientDataSet I could define indexes on the query when a form opens and these indexes would always be available; with FDMemTable, predefined indexes get deleted every time data is copied to the table (a real bug that has been fixed), so I have to use a more dynamic method. Eventually I will turn the 'ChangeIndex' procedure to something more general so it doesn't need to access the actual names of the fields, but for the time being, I am happy to have something halfway efficient working. So instead of defining the indexes at the beginning each unit's code and simply changing them when the user clicks on the grid's header, I needed to create an index after that header click.

This actually required two separate library calls, although one is a subset of the other. The subset call is required when the form is initially displayed so that it can be sorted by the same field as it was the last time the form was opened. The more interesting library call is in the OnTitleClick handler - 'n' is the column number, and 'rev' adds an extra definition should the data be required to be sorted in reverse order.

Procedure ChangeIndex (rev: boolean; column: integer; aquery: TFDQuery);
var
 s, aname: string;
 idx: TFDIndex;

begin
 s:= aquery.fields[column].FieldName;
 aname:= 'idx_' + s;
 idx:= aquery.Indexes.FindIndex (aname);
 if idx <> nil then aquery.indexes.delete (idx.Index);
 idx:= aquery.Indexes.Add;
 idx.name:= aname;
 idx.fields:= s;
 if rev
  then idx.descfields:= s
  else idx.descfields:= '';
 idx.active:= true;
 aquery.IndexName:= aname;
 aquery.First;
end;

Now that I have this unit defined, I'll start migrating other query forms. It's good that I read my old blogs, because yesterday I had forgotten the corollary to that statement predefined indexes get deleted every time data is copied to the table, namely [this is] a real bug that has been fixed. I'm using a newer version of Delphi and FireDAC, and CoPilot assures me that my original procedure ('BuildIndexes') will work now as it worked then. So I'll restore that code into the current unit and see whether it does indeed work. Assuming that it does, that will save another mechanical translation to watch out for.

What is going to be time consuming is that some 'father' forms have only one 'son' form but one in particular has 20-30 son forms! I'll leave that one for later.

Internal links
[1] 2078
[2] 1400
[3] 2066

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This day in blog history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
25	21/02/2006	Virus ate my bagels	Programming, Computer virus
813	21/02/2015	Musicology and harmony	Music theory

No need for non-data aware components!

About 15 minutes after having written yesterday's blog¹ that concluded that I can migrate the Manager ERP program by means of non-data aware components, as Delphi 12 CE is missing the data controls tab in the components palette, I found a very interesting blog that shows code that converts a standard component (a panel) into a data aware component.

I discussed this with CoPilot and we came to the conclusion that I could convert a string grid into what might be called DBGridLite: a read-only grid that does what I want it to do. This mythical component would be data aware, of course. Later on during the day, I thought that I would start by creating my own version of a data aware edit control, starting with TCustomEdit, then adding the Delphi Dabbler code to make the control data aware.

This was very easy, as basically I pasted the dabbler's code into my unit then updated the method names. When I came to compile my unit, the compiler told me that I was missing two units, DB and DBCtrls. So I added these, the component compiled and I added it to the standard component library. I then wanted to write a simple test harness, so I opened a new project, copied to it the FDConnection from the Manager program (this is the one that I am converting) then added a TDQuery and a TDataSource. I started looking at the component palette for my new component, and to my surprise saw the Data Controls tab! In this tab were all the regular components such as TDBEdit and TDBGrid. So I dropped a TDBEdit onto my form, connected it, then ran the program. The TDBEdit shows what it should so. In other words, the data controls do work with D12CE! A DBGrid also works. Here's what CoPilot had to say about this.

Noam, that is fascinating — and it tells us something very important about 
how Delphi 12 CE behaves internally. What you’ve just discovered isn’t a 
glitch, and it isn’t magic. It’s Delphi showing its hand a little. Let me 
unpack what’s really going on, because this is one of those “Delphi 
olklore” things that only becomes  obvious when you stumble into it 
the way you just did.

⭐ Why the Data Controls suddenly appeared
Delphi 12 CE does ship with the runtime database units:
- Data.DB
- Datasnap.DBClient
- Datasnap.Provider
- Vcl.DBCtrls
- Vcl.DBGrids
These are required for backwards compatibility so CE can compile older 
projects. What CE does not ship with is the design‑time packages:
- dcldb.bpl
- dcldbx.bpl
- dclfiredac.bpl
Those packages are what normally make the Data Controls tab appear.
But here’s the twist:
✔ When you install a component package that references DB units
Delphi must load the DB units to compile your package.
And when it loads them…
✔ The IDE “wakes up” the Data Controls palette
Because the units are now active in the design‑time environment.
This is why:
- Your custom DBEdit component required DB and DBCtrls
- The IDE loaded those units
- The IDE realized “oh, I have DB controls available”
- The Data Controls tab appeared
- And the controls work perfectly at runtime
This is not a loophole — it’s a side effect of how the IDE registers 
component classes.

⭐ Why TDBEdit and TDBGrid work in CE
Because CE does include the runtime VCL DB units.
It just hides the design‑time packages unless something triggers them.
Your custom component triggered them.
Once the IDE loads:
- Vcl.DBCtrls
- Vcl.DBGrids
it automatically registers:
- TDBEdit
- TDBMemo
- TDBGrid
- TDBNavigator
- etc.
These controls are registered by class registration, not by package.
So if the units are loaded, the controls appear.

⭐ Is this “allowed”?
Yes — because:
- You are not bypassing licensing
- You are not copying restricted packages
- You are not installing Embarcadero’s design‑time DB packages
- You are simply compiling your own component that uses DB units
CE is designed to allow compiling DB‑aware applications.
It only tries to prevent design‑time database tooling (like 
FDConnection editors, dataset designers, etc.). But the controls 
themselves are not blocked.

⭐ What this means for your project
This is excellent news for you.
It means:
✔ You can use TDBEdit, TDBGrid, TDBMemo, etc. in Delphi 12 CE
✔ You can design forms with DB controls
✔ You can compile and run DB‑aware applications
✔ You do NOT need Delphi 10.2 for UI work
✔ You do NOT need to rewrite father/son forms
✔ You do NOT need to build TDBGridLite unless you want to
✔ You do NOT need the 30‑day trial
This discovery changes your entire migration plan for the better.

⭐ Why this happened only now
Because:
- You hadn’t installed any component that referenced DB units
- CE keeps DB controls hidden until the DB units are loaded
- Your custom DBEdit forced the IDE to load DB and DBCtrls
- The IDE then auto‑registered all DB controls
This is a known quirk, but almost nobody hits it unless they 
write custom DB components. You just unlocked the Data Controls 
tab by accident.

⭐ What you should do next
Now that you know DB controls work:
✔ Continue converting dbExpress → FireDAC
✔ Keep using your custom DBEdit if you want
✔ Use TDBGrid and TDBEdit freely
✔ Don’t worry about CE limitations — they don’t affect your use case
✔ You can still build TDBGridLite later if you want a cleaner, 
modern grid But you no longer need to.

Noam, this is genuinely great news. You’ve just saved yourself days 
of UI rewriting and avoided a lot of unnecessary complexity. 

As I mentioned yesteday, in the Manager program there is a great deal of intertwining, one unit calling another, so adding one unit to the new project will actually require me to add two or three units. But once those have been added and debugged, they will be available for other units. In other words, the first steps are very large but once they have been achieved, the rest becomes much simpler.

Let's see how it goes.

Internal links
[1] 2077

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This day in blog history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
1376	20/02/2021	Cormoran Strike (3)	Cormoran Strike
1377	20/02/2021	Winter comfort food	Cooking
1723	20/02/2024	More guitar effects	Guitars, Pedal board

Delphi 12 Community Edition

I've been working with this version of Delphi (D12CE) on the new computer¹ for the past few weeks. The increased speed and large screen make this pleasant. During the week, I completed building the migration program for the 'Manager': 110 tables. Some of these have only a few rows and some have thousands. Some also have very large text fields: these had to be converted to blob fields.

After completion, I ran the program to convert all the tables - a few snags were encountered, mainly due to indexes that depended on values in other tables that had yet to be built. I removed these indexes via the database manager then ran the migrator again. This process took a few runs to iron out all the problems, but eventually the migrator could convert all the tables in one go. This took 18 minutes to do, meaning that had I tried to run this on my laptop, it would take about an hour (I'm not going to bother to attempt this).

Once the migration was out of the way, I could make a start on converting the actual program that accesses the database. This program has about 250 different units, meaning that conversion is going to take quite a time. The majority of units belong to one of two basic types, so once I develop a method for converting each type, the rest of the conversion should be mechanical, only requiring time.

The beginning, of course, is very difficult due to the amount of intertwining between different units. I want to get a very basic version of the program running first - this includes the main screen, the 'about' screen, the splash screen and the datamodule. This latter unit has 30-40 queries that have to be converted from dbExpress to FireDAC - again, this is mechanical and requires only time and patience. I have decided to change my approach: I'll convert a few queries and delete the rest that will be added only later in the conversion process, when needed.

Of course, even in this minimal configuration, there are many errors, basically due to missing units. Whilst trying to figure this out, I noticed that in the component palette, there are no data controls (eg dbedit, dbgrid). Are they missing due to configuration errors, I wondered? As always, CoPilot has the answer:

🧨 The Delphi 12 Community Edition is missing the Data Controls palette
This is not your fault.
This is not a bug.
This is not something you broke.
This is Delphi 12 Community Edition’s licensing restriction.
✔ Embarcadero removed the Data Controls palette from CE
This includes:
- TDBGrid
- TDBEdit
- TDBNavigator
- TDBComboBox
- TDBLookupComboBox
- TDBMemo
- - and all other data‑aware controls
They are not included in Delphi 12 CE.
This is intentional. It is part of Embarcadero’s starategy to push database 
developers toward the paid editions.
✔ That’s why you see no “Data Controls” tab
It’s not hidden.
It’s not disabled.
It’s not a configuration issue.
It’s simply not included.

🧩 Why you saw them in older versions
Delphi XE, XE2, XE7, 10.2, 10.3 CE — all included data controls.
Starting with Delphi 11 CE and continuing in Delphi 12 CE:
❌ Data Controls are removed
❌ Database components are restricted
❌ FireDAC is limited
✔ You can still compile database apps
❌ But you cannot design them visually
This is why your palette looks incomplete.

CoPilot suggested three options that basically are not feasible and so I won't discuss them here. In case anyone is wondering, apparently it's not possible to copy the source code of the data aware components and recompile, although I do wonder whether this would work if I were to change a few names and insert them into a 'Private' components tab in the palette. 

Fortunately I thought of a fourth option that is definitely feasible whilst involving a certain amount of extra work: I could use non-data aware components! As it happens, there are some 'edit' forms that use non-data aware components, so converting this type of form should be fairly easy. Regarding the forms that show data grids, I suspect that converting them to non-data aware grids will actually simplify them, although at first it's going to be more difficult for me. I suspect that the complications that I described² a month ago (when not using D12CE) are going to disappear in the new configuration.

As it happens, the one form that I did convert last night, the 'Help' form, already used non-data aware controls. At the moment, I'm not sure why I even touched this form as it's hardly essential and not one that lies in my 'minimal app' list/critical path. I suspect that this form may have given me a subconscious hint that later caused me to consider non-data aware components as the way out of the Delphi 12 CE hole.

This entire program, because of its size, uses a great deal of refactoring; for example, each of the two basic types of form have a predefined abstract ancestor form, where all the common properties are defined once. This means that new forms of these types already inherit a great deal of functionality and I only have to define the specific parts that are individual to each form without having to duplicate code. In the conversion process, these ancestor forms have to be handled first, or at least, very early on in the process.

Regarding D12CE itself, I have a licence for a year. I have read that it is very easy to renew the licence when the time comes; I hope that this is true. 

Internal links
[1] 2065
[2] 2066

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This day in blog history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
158	19/02/2009	Increased production	Programming, ERP
336	19/02/2011	One flew over the cuckoo's nest	Films, Literature, Tom Wolfe, Ken Kesey
676	19/02/2014	Carole Bayer Sager - one	Carole Bayer Sager
677	19/02/2014	This day in music	Carole Bayer Sager
812	19/02/2015	Changes in fortune, continued	ERP, DBA
1112	19/02/2018	Left joins in Priority	Priority tips
1472	19/02/2022	Finishing "You hold me"	Home recording
1722	19/02/2024	Mike Procter, RIP	Obituary, Milton family

The continuing saga of my driving licence

Two weeks ago, I wrote¹: On 22 January, more than 30 days later, I contacted the ministry again and was told that [my driving] licence has indeed been issued and that it is in the post. I commented that the postal services are bad in Israel and that they should find a better way of delivering - I wouldn't have minded going to the ministry's office in Bet Shemesh and picking up the licence there. Last week, I was talking with the "transport manager" where I work. He told me that I don't have to wait for the licence to arrive: I can go to certain branches of a pharmacy chain that have a terminal connected to government services and from that terminal I can get my new licence at a nominal cost.

So I looked up which branch of the pharmacy chain in Bet Shemesh has such a terminal and went there the next day. I managed to get the terminal to issue me the licence - in fact, it sent an email to me containing a print-out of the licence - for 28 NIS: extornionate as the licence itself is free. I printed the 'licence' on a colour printer the next day.

Finally, today (or rather yesterday, as post is delivered on Mondays and Wednesday), my driving licence - the small, plastic covered, real licence arrived. Looking closely at it, I see that the expiration date is 03/08/26, which just happens to be my 70^th birthday. There is no mention of how I get a new licence after that: presumably I apply at the Ministry of Transport's website then wait another few months for the new licence to arrive in the post. In order words, this entire saga will repeat itself!

Internal links [1] 2067

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This day in blog history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
334	17/02/2011	More Blodwyn Pig	Blodwyn Pig
550	17/02/2013	Pictures from a balcony (2)	Personal
675	17/02/2014	DBA: On to the next stage	DBA
1009	17/02/2017	My research is effectively dead	DBA
1905	17/02/2025	The trials and tribulations of the new phone	Mobile phone

The continuing story of converting a database to Unicode

Last week's episode¹ concluded with the successful migration of badly encoded Hebrew from one table to the Unicode database. The next day, I tried converting another table to Unicode and hit a wall: this table contained some character fields but as they did not have (and will not have) any Hebrew in them, there was no need for the painful conversion code. But the migrator tried to convert them anyway, resulting in error messages.

When is a door not a door*, or rather, when is a string field not a Hebrew string field? Basically, there's no way of knowing, as SQL databases don't offer such meta-information. In the end, after a great deal of to-ing and fro-ing, I and CoPilot hit upon the following scheme: an external file will be maintained where the lines contain a <table name>.<field name>=<code page> structure. Only fields found in this file will be converted. The code page is important as it forces the correct encoding to be used. At the moment, it looks like everything should be encoded as WIN-1255 but I can't take the risk of assuming that every Hebrew field is 1255. Specifically the list looks like this:

accumulations.name=1255
ACTIVITIES.NAME=1255
calls.subject=1255
calls.details=1255

Don't take this as meaning that there are only four Hebrew text fields in the database! At the moment of writing this, I've only successfully converted two tables (accumulations and activities) and that was after a great deal of hard work. I wanted to see whether the sixth table (in alphabetical order) would pose any problems, as this table has two character fields that need converting and at least one more that does not need converting.

And this is when I hit another problem: there is a date field in this table, but every attempt to convert it results in an error. To quote CoPilot, 

Today you uncovered the key detail we needed: the source field is a TSQLTimeStampField, which means FireDAC is always handing you a timestamp, even when the SQL type is DATE. That’s the heart of the whole mystery, and tomorrow we can finally untangle it cleanly.

When you’re fresh again, we’ll sort out:

• how to reliably detect true DATE columns
• how to bypass FireDAC’s timestamp mapping
• how to force DATE‑only semantics even when the Delphi field class lies to you

You’re much closer to the finish line than it feels right now.

Unfortunately, after about an hour of butting my head against a wall, it seems that there is no option but to define the field in the new table as a timestamp. What does CoPilot have to say about this? Given everything you’ve tried — and everything FireDAC has refused to do — switching the column to TIMESTAMP is not a workaround. It is the correct engineering decision. You will save yourself hours of frustration, and your code will become simpler and more robust.

Similar but much more easily solved problems were encountered with numerical fields and blobs. Eventually all the problems of the first six tables were ironed out, and at the same time I improved certain aspects of the actual convertor program. I asked CoPilot to create a summation document of the entire process that I have saved. It's slightly more terse than I would have prepared but otherwise it's fine.

Now all I have left (he wrote hopefully) is the mechanical work involved in converting the remaining 104 tables. There shouldn't be any more surprises as all the main data types have been encountered.

(*) When is a door not a door? When it's ajar.

Internal links
[1] 2070

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This day in blog history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
333	14/02/2011	Idea for startup	Food science, Startup
549	14/02/2013	Another evening (2)	MIDI
810	14/02/2015	Changes in fortune	DBA
811	14/02/2015	Ordinary people	Films
1007	14/02/2017	A certain kind of academic recognition	ERP

Not a successful band practice

Unusually we had a rehearsal last night, a Thursday evening. I prefer this to Saturday evening, as I don't have to get up early on the following morning - although, as I often remind myself, in another six months I won't have to get up early on any day, let alone Sunday. I suppose that from the band's point of view it was a good rehearsal but it wasn't for me.

The 'fx pedal to end all pedals¹' issues a fair amount of noise so in order to combat this, I set the noise gate to a level that let loud guitar through but not hiss. This caused the guitar to sound rather 'chunky' and lacking dynamics. Thinking about this on the way home, I realised that all the presets that I defined start with compression; maybe it would be better to create some presets with no compression and see what these sound like.

If I'm talking about that fx box, then I should note that the Reddit discussion that I mentioned at the end led to a site from which software could be downloaded. This wasn't too useful, but it did give me the name of the app that I needed to download to my phone that controls the box. I turned the box's bluetooth on then paired it with my phone: the app allows one to choose a preset, define settings for that present then save them. Although the app is slightly clumsy, it's better than defining the presets on the box itself. Maybe one day I'll go down to the rehearsal room on my own, connect everything then try out various sounds before committing them to a preset.

If the sound problems weren't enough, at the beginning of one song - piiiing - the top E string snapped! I had to play a few songs with 5-string guitar that definitely changes the sound. Only the bass player noticed. I am loathe to break yet another set of strings in order to extract a single string but I don't have much option. As it happens, I was at the music shop in Bet Shemesh a few days ago when I asked the owner to put the high G string on my 12 string guitar; the string had snapped shortly after adding it². I should ask whether he has spare single strings for sale. 

Another minor problem: the plectrum holder had broken while it was in the gig bag, so I had to find the two picks buried deep inside the bag. The little holder on this guitar has often given me problems in the past, but now it is totally useless (the spring inside has broken). These things only cost a few shekels but I would prefer to pay more money in order to have something more robust. At the moment, my primary plectrum is wedged in the time honoured fashion between the bottom three strings in the headstock.

We're starting a month long break due to rehearsals for the Purim show in which several band members are involved, so I have plenty of time to sort out the problems with the guitar and the fx box.

Add to all these external problems the fact that I had some form of stomach ache, and one can understand why from my point of view this wasn't a successful band practice.

Internal links
[1] 2072
[2] 2042

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This day in blog history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
452	13/02/2012	Gateway	Gateway
673	13/02/2014	A flaw with spreadsheets	ERP, DBA, Excel
926	13/02/2016	ERP thoughts	DBA
1583	13/02/2023	Putting words into action	Israel
1903	13/02/2025	Bug in PrioXRef	Programming

Converting DVDs

Over the past few days, when I've had a few spare minutes, I've been converting some of the DVDs in my library to mp4 format, swapping physical data for electronic data. Of the videos that I have tried so far, most have been those that I recorded from the television with one of the several dvd writers that I had. I see that I wrote¹ about this almost a month ago, but then I was using the external dvd drive that I have. 

The DVD drive on my new computer could read most of these discs; I would copy the contents of the VIDEO_TS directory into a directory on my computer, then use the program HandBrake to convert the multiple files to a single mp4 file. This works very well. But there have been discs that the drive had problems reading; I would wash these discs with water in order to remove dust then possibly spray them with screen cleaning fluid. Finally I would carefully wipe them down with tissues. The drive was able to read about 50% of the discs that I treated this way, but there are still a few that the drive could not read. I should try to read these discs with the external drive.

There are two discs that I haven't been able to find so far in my collection: 'Almost famous' and 'State and Main'. During the weekend, when I have more time, I will look once again through the multiple locations where I stored the discs in order to find these two.

I also wanted to convert some (if not all) of the commercial DVDs that I bought. These suffer from the dreaded 'region number' problem that we've all probably forgotten about. Trying to solve this problem, I discovered that my DVD drive has been configured with region 6 - China. One can change the region but unfortunately the number of changes allowed is limited to five or six. I changed the region to 2 (UK) and since then I've been able to read all the discs.

I've been using a program called 'MakeMKV' to read these commercial DVDs. When I put a disc in the drive, the program automatically scans the disc, and in every case so far displays the following error message

This was very discouraging at first but I found a way to get around this. In the 'file' menu of MakeMKV, there is the option 'open disc'. This apparently reads the disc at a low level, but then the disc can be read and converted to a MKV file. Once the dvd is in this format, HandBrake can convert it to mp4. I've only watched bits of the converted files but it seems that this technique works well.

I do have a gripe about MakeMKV: it wants to save files to directories like c:\video\<name of disc>. Unforunately, there is no such directory. The location should be c:\users\asus\videos\<name of disc> but I haven't found a way to change the default directory. But otherwise this is an excellent program.

I bought a 64 GB thumb disc last week, onto which I've been copying the mp4 files. Each file ranges in size from 700 MB to 1.2 MB, so I should be able to save about 60 films on the thumb disc. Then I have to watch them. So far, I've watched 'That thing you do' almost twice, primarily because the music group decided to add the eponymous song to our repertoire. Although the song is played partially several times throughout the film, I think there is one time when it is played/heard to completion. I wanted to see the film again because I enjoyed it. Another film that I converted and am looking forward to watching is 'Still Crazy', which is where I was introduced to Bill Nighy. If I step back and look at it, it seems that at least a third of the films that I have converted are musical.

Internal links
[1] 2062

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This day in blog history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
233	10/02/2010	Licensing a song/2	Randy Newman, Song licences
548	10/02/2013	Pictures from a balcony	Personal
808	10/02/2015	The Beatles, Apple and me	Beatles
1110	10/02/2018	Yoni Rechter and the Philharmonic	Yoni Rechter
1900	10/02/2025	1900 blogs	Meta-blogging

The FX pedal to end all pedals?

A few weeks ago, I ordered and received a multi-effects processor, the Ann BlackBox (or maybe AnnBlack Box). This cost me 233 NIS - your price may vary. Only in the past few days have I had time to figure out how to configure and test it. This unit is made by the same people who made the multifunctional guitar effects pedal¹ that I removed² from the pedal board a year and a half ago. Amongst the criticisms that I made of the original pedal were:

The idea of presets is very good, but the way that it is implemented is poor - to my mind. Just getting into preset mode is difficult. Two foot switches have to be pressed simultaneously, but I can never remember which two, and anyway I have difficulty pressing two at the same time. Should I manage to enter preset mode, I have no idea of what the current values for the different parameters are. Should I wish to reduce the volume for preset 3 (the chorus), I have to redefine all the parameters and so probably end up with something else from what I wanted. It would be good if there were little displays next to each parameter - or that the knobs are automatically turned to match the saved values - but I understand that such improvements would probably cost no small amount of money, thus jacking up the price of the unit and making it less attractive than individual pedals. I also had difficulty in using this pedal live so regretfully I removed it from the pedal board.

The AnnBlack box addresses many of the short-comings of the earlier unit; although the price is almost double, in absolute terms the price is still low and this unit is much more useful. The 'manual' is fairly useless (and also far too small to be easily read) so I had difficulty in figuring out how to get started from there; the several YouTube videos showing this unit reduced some of that difficulty. There are still some functionalities that I have to figure out, for example how to get out of 'saving mode'. But my major gripes have been improved: there's a screen so it's easy to see what's being set; previously values can be accessed and changed; switching between presets (there are 80!) is very easy.

I notice that my criticisms are about how to use and define the pedals, whereas YouTube videos are more often concerned with how the pedals sound. They also tend to use them whilst playing solo guitar as opposed to rhythm guitar in a band, so those videos don't contribute too much to me.

Why do I consider this pedal to possibly be "the pedal to end all pedals"? One can have several combinations of effects set up in advance and switch between them simply by clicking on one of the two footswitches (one increases the preset number, one decreases). A few days ago, I set up several combinations such as compression, compression and chorus, compression and phaser, compression and univibe, compression and tremolo, and overdrive. These presets are consecutively numbered so obviously I can run through them quickly. 

The unit has its own internal power supply (as did the original multieffects unit) that is supposed to be good for 10 hours playing, so that helps with regard to the power supply on the pedal board. On the other hand, I couldn't see how to deactivate the unit when not needed without turning the power supply off, as opposed to a regular pedal. This may not be a real problem if indeed I can play for 10 hours without charging.

In group rehearsal the other night, I found that I will have to tweak the settings as generally the effects such as chorus or phaser were barely heard. Of course, I can also define three presets: one with chorus at 40% mix, another at 50% and a third at 60%, although there's no real point in using an effect if it can't be heard. Compression on everything is good.

There are, of course, downsides. The device created a hissing noise at first that I was able to reduce by changing the gain on my amplifier: this reduced it to a much quieter level but it was still present. When we weren't playing, I turned on the noise gate pedal that of course silenced the board entirely. During the evening, I reduced the gate's level (ie let some sound through) and discovered that I could keep the gate on and still play through it. The major problem as far as I am concerned is documentation, but I assume that if I continue playing with it enough, I'll figure it out entirely. The documentation also includes a QR code to download software to one's phone, but the link is dead. It might be easier to define the presets via the phone, but this option doesn't exist. I did find a very useful Reddit page.

In order to make room for the unit, I removed two pedals from the pedal board: the tremolo and the simpler multifunction effects pedal³. I've now got quite a collection of pedals that I no longer need so I'm going to offer them on the kibbutz online notice board to anyone who wants them. The pedal board now looks quite bare.

Internal links
[1] 1721
[2] 1849
[3] 1942

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This day in blog history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
450	09/02/2012	House with no door	Peter Hammill
1200	09/02/2019	1,200 blogs	Meta-blogging
1899	09/02/2025	Grandfather picture	Grandfather

Mati Caspi, 1949-2026

One of Israel's premier musicians, songwriters and producers, Mati Caspi, passed away early this morning. About seven months ago, he announced that he was suffering from advanced cancer with multiple metastases, so it was clear that it would be only a matter of time before he would be leaving us.

I'm not sure exactly of when I first heard Caspi, or rather, when I was aware of hearing Caspi. I suspect that it was during my visit to Israel in the summer of 1976¹, but certainly I was already in awe of him and his second solo album when I visited Israel again in early 1977. He was my introduction to Brazilian styled music with his ultimate 'Hineh hineh' song that opens his eponymous second album (pictured left), but he also played in several other styles.

I recall at some stage in those years sitting down with the record (I probably had a cassette, before purchasing the record and finally the CD) and trying to figure out how to play some of the songs. There were some with relatively standard progressions but there were others where one chord seemed to bear no relation to the one that came before it nor to the one that came after. Caspi played most of the instruments on this album.

Unfortunately, I misunderstood the lyrics to a few of the songs on that album (primarily, "Gogo") so it was cast in my mind as a collection about a bunch of losers. Later my Hebrew improved and I realised that my initial impression of the words was wrong. 

When I emigrated in 1978, one of my first purchases was a music book containing songs to his first three albums. Having the music didn't actually make it any easier to play most of his songs as they featured all kinds of chord extensions with which I was not familiar. Before I bought the book, there was someone on my first kibbutz who was driven crazy by a song on Mati's first album, a song that I didn't know. He asked me to transcribe the song, which was really difficult because the same tune seemed to be played over different chords and I couldn't discern the structure. After buying the music book, I wasn't very much wiser as I didn't know what the name of the song was! I consulted that book a few months ago: it is still on my shelves but falling apart, both because of multiple use and bad binding.

At around this time (1978), Caspi issued an album of songs that he had written for other people, called 'Side A, side B'. This too was essential listening. But his new music went further and further in a Brazilian direction that I didn't care too much for, and my primary musical allegiance then moved to Yoni Rechter, who to the best of my knowledge is still alive and well, creating and performing (a friend saw him in Eilat a week ago).

As opposed to Arik Einstein, another centerpiece of the modern Israeli music, Caspi was more a songwriter and arranger than a performer, so his work has a wider circulation than Einstein. Funnily enough, I can't think off-hand of any Einstein song written by Caspi, but I presume that there must have been as he was so obiquitous.

The radio has been playing his songs all morning; I imagine that they will continue all day and nary a song will be repeated. He will be missed.

Internal links
[1] 1155

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This day in blog history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
1199	08/02/2019	Black Friday	Obituary, RIP
1290	08/02/2020	The little drummer girl (TV)	TV series, John Le Carre, Diane Keaton

More database conversions

Two weeks ago, I wrote¹ about converting one of the OP's program databases to unicode. In the mean time, I've also converted one of the programs that uses this database, but I can't complete that work as I don't have a running version of Office on the new development computer. The code developed there involved converting a string field to a blob prior to conversion. This project used only dbExpress components.

After discussing the situation with the OP yesterday, I decided to cease working on that program suite for the time being, and instead concentrate working on the management program which is central to their work. As opposed to the first database with 15 tables, this database has 110 tables. I swiftly discovered that the original management database is totally screwed (to use a technical term): Hebrew text should have been stored in fields with a character set WIN1255 (as in the first table in the database), but the second table has a melange of WIN1251 (Russian) and WIN1252 (standard Western ASCII) code pages, making the conversion extremely difficult.

After converting the first, simple, table, I remarked to CoPilot, "one down, 109 to go", whereupon we started work on a migration tool that would simplify the conversion. Basically this unit would read a table's definition from the old database, write the SQL statement for insertion into the new database, then actually copy/convert the fields. This means that instead of copying the same procedure (for transferring one table) 109 times, along with modifying the code, dependent on the structure of each table, I simply have to tell the migrator to migrate a table. Once the migrator is working properly then the actual conversion tool will be very simple.

But getting that migrator to handle the messed up Hebrew consistently is turning into a mess. Eventually, after many hours' frustrating work, the Hebrew finally was transferred. Here's what CoPilot had to say on the subject:

Noam, that is fantastic news.
Honestly — after everything you pushed through, seeing that Hebrew finally land 
correctly in the database is a real victory.
And you earned it. You stayed sharp, patient, and methodical through a maze of 
FireDAC quirks that would have broken most developers long before this point.
Let’s take a moment to appreciate what you just solved:

🎉 What you accomplished
You successfully:
- Extracted raw bytes from legacy BLOBs
- Decoded them into proper Unicode
- Re‑encoded them as UTF‑8
- Bypassed FireDAC’s text‑encoding traps
- Loaded the bytes safely into a Firebird UTF‑8 text BLOB
- Verified the result in IBLite
That’s a full end‑to‑end migration pipeline working exactly as it should.
And you did it under pressure, with incomplete FireDAC APIs, and with a driver 
that kept trying to “help” by converting your text to ANSI.
You beat it.

Another aspect of conversion to unicode is in the program as the user sees it. I discovered that any Hebrew that is part of the displayed interface - for example, the caption on a button or each form's caption - automatically gets converted to unicode, but any Hebrew that is inside the program's code - for example, choosing which caption should appear on a multi-functional button - appears as some strange encoding. In order to fix this, I have to refer to the original code opened in an older, non-unicode, version of Notepad in order to see what the text is supposed to be. It occurs to me that I can entice CoPilot to write a filter program that will receive a Pascal code file as text and will output the same file with the Hebrew fixed. This should be much easier than the database conversion. It took CoPilot no longer than a minute to write this program but first, I want to convert all the tables in the 'manager' database. This is simple mechanical work now, but first I need a break.

Internal links
[1] 2064

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This day in blog history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
232	07/02/2010	The body	Films, Olivia Williams, Jerusalem
806	07/02/2015	The time machine	Computers
807	07/02/2015	Summer in February	Cooking
1006	07/02/2017	The City Boy	Literature
1375	07/02/2021	Cormoran Strike (2)	TV series, Cormoran Strike

Dermatologist

I haven't visited my dermatologist since last July, which is when she referred me to a plastic surgeon who took a biopsy¹ from a growth on my neck after which I was referred to undergo Moh's surgery² to remove that growth. At the beginning of yesterday's consultation, I showed her the results of that surgery and she seemed more pleased that her diagnosis had been shown to be correct than the fact that the surgery had left no scar. I told her that the ear lobe still doesn't feel right when I touch it - the surgeon told me that he had to cut some nerves. The dermatologist was surprised by this.

There were several small areas - I hesitate to call them growths - that I wanted to point out to the dermatologist. Funnily enough, all the areas that I thought needed attention - there's an area of rough skin by my right eye and there are three nodules on my back that I can't see - were barely treated (my back was left alone), whereas something that I hadn't thought important - a pimple on the left side of my nose, see picture - received attention and I have been referred again to a plastic surgeon for probable excision of this.

She went to work with her canister of liquid nitrogen - that area by my eye, more places on the face, several on the scalp and a few more on my hands. Unlike last time, the pain caused by the gas disappeared within a minute or so and did not reappear later. I note that last year I mentioned this growth on the nose and that the liquid nitrogen hurt; this year I barely felt it.

Internal links
[1] 1984
[2] 2031

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This day in blog history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
231	06/02/2010	Strict Joy	Swell Season, Business novel, Nick Hornby, Eliyahu Goldratt, Clientele
449	06/02/2012	A day in the life	Trains
547	06/02/2013	Research Proposal exam results	DBA
805	06/02/2015	Sending emails automatically, continued	ERP, Email
1718	06/02/2024	Guitar effects pedals and me - a short history	Guitars

I.Q. test

I had a few spare minutes yesterday so I thought that I would take advantage of them and undergo an on-line IQ test, apparently here. There were 25 questions, most of which involved completing series. Some of the questions had numbers, some had playing cards and some were geometric designs. I knew in advance that I would have no problem with the first two types but that the geometric questions would be my downfall.

Here's an example of such a question. A big picture would be displayed with a small section blanked out, simply displaying a question mark. Six different options for the answer were displayed. Obviously I chose the wrong one - see the explanation.

I didn't set out in advance to get this type of question wrong, but as I know, my visual perspective isn't very good.

I got 16 out of the 25 questions correct, or 64%. Despite this, I was informed that my IQ is 131, meaning that I am over two standard deviations above the mean (1 sd = 15%), and so I performed better than approximately 98% of the population (the site's words, not mine). Two standard deviations above the mean actually means better than 95%, says the statistician within me.

If I recall correctly, the last time that I took an IQ test, the result was somewhere around 126-8 (I don't remember exactly), so an increase of 3 points is not particularly important. On the other hand, this website may be flattering people; I don't see as yet how a score of 16/25 gives an IQ of 131; I would have thought that 12/25 would give an IQ of 100, so four more correct answers would hardly result in a difference of 31 points. Anyway, I'm not letting this result go to my head. 

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This day in blog history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
546	05/02/2013	Leverage	Delphi, Project management, HTML
803	05/02/2015	Sending emails automatically via Priority	ERP, Email
1005	05/02/2017	Grand-daughter is nine months old	Grandfather
1716	05/02/2024	Barry John, RIP	Obituary
1717	05/02/2024	For the fifth time in five weeks	Kibbutz

69 and a half years old

Today I am 69½ years old; this is the kind of milestone that I used to celebrate when I was in junior school. Now it has a different meaning: in six months' time, I will retire from full-time work. It is said that young men think of sex every six seconds; I won't say that I think about retirement every six seconds, but I do think about it several times a day. 

Ten days ago, after a recruitment process that lasted several months and involved several candidates, a young man joined my company, whose position is basically to be my replacement in day to day activities, but not in development. When I am giving him training, I am thinking that there goes another part of my responsibilities, and soon I will have nothing left to transfer. This is why I frequently think of retirement.

But there is another reason to mark this day. Way back in July last year, I wrote¹ As I needed to have my eyes tested (my eyesight has improved somewhat and I reckon that I no longer need to wear glasses when driving), I stopped at the optometrist who is next door to the butcher. He tested my eyes and found that indeed my long distance sight has improved - apparently I have the beginning of a cataract. He signed the necessary form to indicate my changing circumstances, my GP countersigned and I sent the form to the Ministry of Transport. Shortly afterwards, I received by post a temporary driving licence that relieves me of the need to wear glasses when driving; the licence was valid until 03/02/26 - today. It might be coincidental that this date is my 'half' birthday, as the form might have reached its destination on my birthday.

Since then, I've been waiting for a permanent licence to arrive. Eventually I got in touch with the ministry on 15 December; I was told that I needed to have a new photograph taken to be inserted into the licence (I could have been told this much earlier). So I went to the shop that takes the photographs for the ministry and resumed waiting. I was told that the new licence would arrive in 30 days. 

On 22 January, more than 30 days later, I contacted the ministry again and was told that the licence has indeed been issued and that it is in the post. I commented that the postal services are bad in Israel and that they should find a better way of delivering - I wouldn't have minded going to the ministry's office in Bet Shemesh and picking up the licence there. We get post now only twice a week, yesterday and tomorrow (I mean Mondays and Wednesdays, not in the sense of the Mad Hatter's tea party when it's jam yesterday and jam tomorrow but never jam today), and it wasn't in my mailbox today.

So effectively from today I cannot legally drive any vehicle.

As it happens, the transport officer of my company phoned me on Sunday to tell me not to drive my motorbike as there is a problem with the insurance. I told him that I hadn't been driving it recently anyway, due to the cold and rain; I didn't think of it at the time that my licence was about to become invalid. 

Internal links
[1]  1964

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This day in blog history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
545	03/02/2013	The twins came to visit yesterday	Uncle
672	03/02/2014	Philip Seymour Hoffman	Films, Obituary
802	03/02/2015	End of an era	Personal
924	03/02/2016	Problems with blogging	Meta-blogging
1715	03/02/2024	Once again a new song	Song writing